You don't get much chance to see experimental theater in Sarasota. Maybe it's because so much of the audience is gray- (or white-) haired, and producers naturally (and, I'd like to think, wrongly) suspect that the prevailing taste is conservative. Or maybe it's because the most visible American playwrights these days — at least the ones who make news with their Tonys and Pulitzers — tend to be dramatic realists.
True, the Florida Studio Theatre has gone out on a limb with The Play About the Baby, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the unusually structured Metamorphoses. But when you think of all the plays that challenge conventional thought about drama — even plays by such mainstream figures as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and Anna Deveare Smith, not to mention Europeans from Pirandello to Beckett — what's most notable about them is how seldom (if ever) Sarasotans get to see them. And as for not-quite-famous experimentalists like Mac Wellman and Naomi Iizuka, don't even bother to check the listings. You'd have a better chance of finding President Bush studying It Takes a Village.
Blue Window, presented by the FSU/Asolo Conservatory, is a relief, therefore — a relief from all the dramas that respect linear action, cautious characterization, strictly logical dialogue. Craig Lucas' play features five different settings overlapping at one time, fragments of interwoven dialogue, a character who freezes everyone else's action when she suddenly starts singing, and a theme — falling through space — that's picked up, dropped and picked up again, in an unexpected way, like a motif in jazz.
In fact, jazz may be Lucas' model, specifically the jazz of pianist Cecil Taylor, who, says the character Tom, is "literally rethinking what you can do with melody. He's changing all the rules from the ground up. He's taking all your expectations and kind of throwing them back at you."
Blue Window isn't quite as daring as all that — it contains whole sections that are exceedingly ordinary — but at its best it reminds us that there's a poetry of the stage too often ignored by our realist playwrights. This drama isn't quite successful, but it offers a few moments of unusual beauty.
It's all about a party. Libby, who's in the midst of a relationship with Griever, has invited novelist Alice and her lover, Boo, composer Tom and his girlfriend Emily, along with Norbert, a skydiver, to her apartment in Manhattan. When the play begins, we see all the partiers as they prepare — in five separate apartments — for the evening.
Everything's on stage at once: There's alternating and simultaneous dialogue; one character sings a few bars from "As Time Goes By;" another character dances to Keith Jarrett-like music; Libby practices complimenting Alice on her latest novel; Tom remembers a baby grand piano he used to have — and we in the audience try to figure who's who, who's speaking to whom, which figures are couples and which are just accidentally standing near each other.
Then the party starts — and all the confusion turns to clarity as the characters conduct themselves entirely like normal humans trying to have a good time on a Sunday night in Manhattan. There's that one startling interruption — when Emily sings and everyone else's action freezes — but besides that, there's nothing to confuse us.
Finally, the party ends, and we're back to three couples in four different apartments — this time Libby's with Norbert, and Griever's alone — and Libby tells a story that explains just why she's so insecure. The play ends with simultaneous monologues on the subject of floating through a blue window.
At its best, it's lovely. When Griever's dancing alone in his apartment, when Tom convinces us to listen closely to Cecil Taylor, when Libby explains sadly what terrible series of events led to her broken life, the experience is moving. But there's lots, too, that doesn't work: The interwoven dialogue is as often confusing as it is jazzy; the dialogue at the party is unnecessarily banal; the characters Tom and Emily are so underwritten that it's hard to believe in their reality, and there's just too much weltschmerz in the play's last, weepy moments.
Fortunately, there's much to like in the acting. Julie Lachance as Libby is a strangely shy and melancholy figure who wins our hearts even before we hear her all-revealing story. Matt Brown as Griever is charismatic as the compassionate lover who's trying to help her return to social life after long isolation. As Boo, Karis Danish is delightfully silly, getting so drunk she can't remember what it is that family therapists like her do; and as her lover Alice, Jessi Blue Gormezano gives us solid, if not very prismatic acting.
The other thespians are only adequate: Marcus Denard Johnson as Norbert, Juan Javier Cardenas as Tom and Jennifer Ryan Peery Logue as Emily all lack that iridescence that makes good acting fascinating. Further, Logue has trouble with the high notes of the William Bolcom song she attempts, and Cardenas seems more interested in his guitar than in reaching the audience.
Greg Leaming's direction is tolerable, but fails to find the visual equivalent of Lucas' jazz model. James Florek's minimalist set doesn't help us distinguish one apartment from the next, though the oversize window at the back looking out at a cloud-flecked blue sky is wonderfully apt. Michele Macadaeg's costumes are as felicitous as could be, though, and Jeffrey Dillon's lighting is nicely evocative.
Even though it has failings, I recommend Blue Window to anyone interested in what the theater can do when it's more than the living equivalent of a short story. Author Lucas, who's best known for the play and movie Prelude to a Kiss, is on to something here: There's no reason at all why a play can't be structured like a jazz piece. I only wish he'd gone further, really thrown our expectations back in our faces, really gotten to the core of his characters and their situations.
But if Blue Window is more Kenny G than John Coltrane, even that could be a start. In Sarasota, it's usually the old shopworn melodies that get played night after night.
The revolution has to start somewhere. Why not with this carefully daring Blue Window?
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 1, 2007.